This was a joke of a decade
And I'm here for the punchline
I’ve got some theories about what we all just lived through—because how could I not? Watching friends, people I genuinely thought I *knew*, unravel into walking propaganda machines straight out of a Soviet fever dream has left me spinning. It was like they woke up one morning and decided to cosplay as Orwellian zealots or, worse, fascists. And not the ironic kind. Suddenly, everyone was ready to play Thought Police, demanding anyone with a dissenting opinion disappear like they were auditioning for the Anne Frank reboot. Yeah, I said it. That’s where we were.
This isn’t just a phase we’ll memory-hole once the next trend takes over. Nope. What we’ve just lived through is heading straight for the history books, filed under *WTF Happened to Humanity?* Sociologists, psychologists, and probably some future A.I. overlords are going to spend decades dissecting this collective meltdown. How did “live, laugh, love” turn into “cancel, condemn, control”? How did people you used to split nachos with at 2 a.m. turn into ideological stormtroopers ready to destroy friendships over a hashtag? It’s going to be studied and meme-ified until we’re all dead.
Case in point: one of my oldest friends—funny, kind, and previously *normal*—decided I was a white supremacist. Me. Someone whose two biggest heroes are Martin Luther King Jr. for the whole “judge by character, not skin color” thing, and Mister Rogers, who practically sang *be kind to everyone*. The absurdity would’ve been hilarious if it weren’t so chilling.
But my friend didn’t stop at just slapping me with a label. No, she packed up her righteous indignation, fled the “inherently racist” U.S., and moved to Berlin. Yes, *Berlin.* Specifically, a neighborhood where Jews are, irony of ironies, now actively unwelcome. It’s like Alanis Morissette wrote a new verse just for her. And I’m left sitting here, wondering: How the hell did I spend 15 years with someone who could go from sending me filthy *American Pie*-esque jokes to metaphorically stabbing me in the back with the ideological equivalent of a Swastika-shaped dagger?
The whiplash is almost impressive. Was this lurking in her all along, like some kind of ideological sleeper agent? Or is this what happens when naive people drink the Kool-Aid of bad ideas? Either way, it’s a plot twist that’s left me disoriented and questioning every shared laugh and late-night conversation.
But here’s the thing: as soul-crushing as the last decade’s censorship and identity politics have been, they’ve also handed me a bizarre, backhanded gift. Isolation forced me into a staring contest with my shadow self—the parts of me I’d buried under years of people-pleasing and low self-esteem. At first, it was terrifying. Fear, anger, discomfort—they all came rushing in like an unwelcome ex at a party. But once I stopped resisting, something wild happened: I learned to accept it all. Turns out, embracing your inner goblin is the price of admission to an extraordinary life.
And what did I find on the other side? Resilience. Fearlessness. Honor. A weird kind of humility that doesn’t involve pretending to be someone I’m not. Meanwhile, while the zealots were busy climbing the ranks of the Oppression Olympics for gold medals in hypocrisy, I was building something sturdier: a foundation of truth and actual virtue. Because when the dust settles—and it *will* settle—it won’t be their “glory” that changes the world. It’ll be the real visionaries. The ones who can take all this chaos and alchemize it into a renaissance of art, literature, film, and humanity.
But let’s not kid ourselves: I didn’t survive this era by being a stoic saint. Oh no. I absolutely watched videos of people losing their minds in public and laughed. Did it bring me joy? You bet it did. Do I feel like a sociopath? Only when they deserved it. Because sometimes the only real way to heal is to laugh so hard at the absurdity that your ribs hurt. Unleash a tsunami of sarcasm so strong it washes away everyone’s self-importance.
So yeah, I’ve got my theories. And I’m holding on to hope. But I’m also holding on to my sense of humor—because if we can’t laugh at this madness, what’s even the point?